The Inheritance

Earn what is given to you.

On Conduits

25

JUL/13

Boy is this weird. We stole Thantos’s blood, and left the room, but Dick is still in there. We must take the vial to the receptacle for an audience with the Raven Queen.

We’re out of Thantos’s room, there are 2 stairwells in this landing, one goes back to Thantos, one goes to the altar. Dick! How could we forget about Dick. He runs down the steps, squeaking up a storm about this note he’s got in his mouth. We read it, it’s a suicide note from a woman saying that she “couldn’t be with him any longer because he was too focused on his experiments.”

Huh. There’s no name on this note, but, it’s a little funny because we could have sworn we had heard a similar story but the ending was different. Did she kill herself, or was she accidentally killed by this scientist who was now toiling to bring her back to life?

We’re in the Rotatey Room, and Obblet notices the walls are completely plastered with the name “Beatrice” in handwriting. Is he on that dankgrass? We don’t see anything, until he hands around the vial. Haminahamina! We all see it and it’s freaking us out so we try to focus on something else. The feather we need falls from the ceiling, and we put it into the fire to pass through. In this hallway, we notice more writing on the floor. It says “The dead walk slower near the end.” This is creepy and nothing more.

The urn is very high up in this room, I can reach it use it fancy acrobatics so I use fancy acrobatics to reach it. I can’t get it down but I do notice a string coming out from the shelf where the urn is perched. It rotates the whole room, and sends the party flying! I knew this would happen, but I like to see these guys get tossed around so I pulled it and suffered the hilarious consequences. I pull the string 4 times pretending I didn’t expect the results.

Finally the urn is ours, we complete the ritual by pouring in the blood and the feather. The urn regards us by glowing a little bit with some non-religious symbols. Welltick checks it, it’s clearly science stuff. I take the urn and we all head back to the Conduit to double-check this suicide note story. He gets pretty shifty, and we try some various interrogation techniques we’ve learned in our journeys. Unfortunately he’s undead or something, so none of the pain or physical threats really work. Someone must see that the cat’s out of the bag, because the Raven Queen takes over and says “THERE IS NO WAYOUT.” and blasts the Conduit into a heap on the ground.

We divert conversation at this point, and learn that the Conduit really has no idea how he got here. This whole thing is starting to stink! He agrees to take us to the teleporter room that can bring us to the Throne. The Queen appears again and says something to the effect of “ENJOY THERIDE, BITCHES!”

We’re in a maze now. Each room basically has your standard 4 walls like we have in the land of the living, with a door on each wall heading…somewhere. We land in a Mazebo, and there is a pedestal with a book resting on it. We scribble some words on the book but the ink rises off the paper, jiggles, and then scatters. We ruin our clothes trying to guess any other words that the book will accept, but we get stuck after “The.”

With nowhere else to go, we venture off into the maze looking for clues. Each room has a word on the floor, and some doors have a glyph above them. No one else can understand these glyphs but me because they’re in Giant and I took Giant in high school because I went to kind of a nice high school.

The words are different in each room, and when we travel far enough away from the Mazebo we get ambushed and warped back to the start. Things start to get a little dicey because we’re sick of all the fighting all the time, and there is some dissent amongst us. Also some of the ghosts are challenging our Will and we end up taking a few shots at each other. Obblet stabbed Naxgarth, I shot an arrow at Welltick, it got bad. Finally we remember that thing that we thought was nothing is actually a thing. “The dead walk slower near the end.” It sticks in the book, and we know now to walk east, east, west, south, north, east, and east. I’m pretty sure that’s what we did, it was dark and hard to take notes.

The path we trod led us back to the Gazebo but this time a new door for the Throne Room had appeared. I bet this made the Raven Queen feel pretty stupid, because we found it and it wasn’t a big deal. Doesn’t she know what we’re capable of?

The Throne Room has a big big statue gripping a locked tube. He talks a lot of nonsense. He talks like 8 or 9 nonsenses. There’s a lock-code on the tube, each of the 5 wheels has every letter of the alphabet, and there’s some secret codeword that will open it. After several repetitions of the nonsenses, we realize they are not nonsenses but actually haiku. Because “ISTUS” does not work, nor “RAVEN” or “QUEEN” we enter “HAIKU” and it pops open. Inside is a detailed schematic of one called the Soul Eater. He is an imposter, posing as the Raven Queen, keeping people trapped on this plane for his amusement and sustenance. Our goal now clear, we head to the Altar Room via magicks.

Igor’s dead now. [citation needed]

We arrive in the Gate Room and try to quickly cast all the incantations necessary to bind the Soul Eater and end his reign. It will take 8 spells, and unfortunately the room starts to flood with Wailers. They pour in from the walls in bigger and bigger waves. They have a stun power that locks us and keeps us from protecting Welltick, who gets the shit kicked out of him to be honest. We fight valiantly, stunned, unstunned, stunned, unstunned, and Welltick takes it from pretty much every Wailer in the realm. Down to 1 hit point, our mighty Welltick opens the Portal or kills the Soul Eater or something like that ,and we all make it back to the earthly plane!

I try to hug Ronald, but my feeble hands pass right through him! What a life of pain I will lead from this point on! Never to hug old big bear again. Sulking at my fate, I notice everyone else is hard at work finding their bodies. Silly me! I’m a ghost! We find them our bodies, along with a Red Cape. Back to full power, Nax shatters the Opal that got us into this mess in the first place, and thousands of souls pour out of it. Beneath the wreckage lies a new card.